Sex and Schrodinger's Cat

Sit down, this is a good one:

One of my lady friends – let’s call her C – was recently having an issue with a close friend of hers, let’s call him D. C and D had been best buds for some time. They were part of a larger group of friends who did all sorts of fun, barkada-type things together. Then one night, alone in D’s house, they happened to share an unexpected kiss. Or seven.

Now C is stressed because they have over-stepped boundaries. Or at least, she feels that they have. She pings me and asks for advice, and I sagely tell her to “have sex with D and see if there’s anything there.” She says it would be weird, because they’ve been friends for so long.

This was about a week ago. Fast forward to today, and I’m sick and alone at home watching The Big Bang Theory. Specifically the final episode of the first season, wherein they quaintly use Schrodinger’s Cat as an analogy for a situation that was pretty similar to C and D’s. At least, similar enough that I felt compelled to write about it.

In case you’ve forgotten:

Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment meant to illustrate the counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics. In the experiment, we place a cat inside a box along with a vial of poison. The vial of poison is set to open at an undefined point in the future. The poison will obviously kill the cat if this happens. We close the box, and are unable to determine by external means whether the cat is alive or dead.

Now, under the rules set by quantum mechanics, for as long as that box is sealed, that cat is both alive and dead. Why? Because we are unable to observe for ourselves which state the cat is in. However, this is counter-intuitive (and quite frankly, makes little sense) because the cat cannot, in reality, be both alive and dead. It is one or the other.

How does this relate to the story of C and D? It’s simple, really. At this point in time, their relationship is both platonic and romantic. They maintain that they are friends and yet that kiss (or series of kisses, I should say) have incontrovertibly changed things. But a relationship cannot be both platonic and romantic, in the same way as Schrodinger’s Cat cannot be both dead and alive. It doesn’t make sense in the thought experiment, and it doesn’t make sense in real life either.

So how do we know which one it is? Why, by opening the box, of course :)

The Death of Plurk

I was musing today about Twitter and Plurk, and how strongly people seem to feel about one or the other. I'm going to try to avoid all the obvious talking points here (i.e., Twitter has no threaded conversations, Plurk encourages nonsense posts, Twitter is always down, Plurk is always down, etc., etc.) and concentrate instead on market adoption. Twitter is growing its population and visitors rapidly every month (Compete pegged it at 3.4m uniques last November), and some people have said that it will become as big as Facebook this year. Meanwhile, Plurk numbers are relatively stagnant, hovering between 200k and 300k uniques. Even Friendfeed seems to be doing better (a little over 500k/month), although the difference between that and the market leader is so huge as to be almost laughable.

Let's take a moment to think about this data. In the last half of 2008, Twitter numbers almost doubled from 1.8m to 3.4m, which is a jawdropping feat in and of itself. Plurk hasn't budged since it hit its tipping point in May, and Friendfeed has grown by only about 15%. (I'm not the only one who noticed this either.)

However, remember that Compete only tracks website visits, and a significant portion of Twitter's users come to it via desktop or mobile clients. How "significant" is significant, you ask? Try 73%. Yes, roughly 3 out of 4 Twitter users access the service via a third-party client. The Compete numbers are just the tip of the iceberg then, because they don't take a huge portion of Twitter's actual usage into account. (Note that I'm not implying that Twitter.com is getting 10m uniques a month; it's highly likely that mobile/desktop numbers have some overlap with the web numbers.)

What do these figures mean to us? Well, it either means everything, or it means nothing. I try to use Plurk whenever I can because a lot of my IRL friends love it. Of course, my Plurk account is just a mirror of my real microblog at Twitter. (Some time ago, Syndeo built a Twitter/Plurk mirroring application to port our tweets over so our timelines would have more activity.) But I cannot shake the feeling that Plurk has started to fade into obscurity - popular only in the Philippines in much the same way as Friendster is, or Orkut is in Brazil, or Fotolog in Argentina. One wonders if perhaps Friendster should buy Plurk, and then resell the whole kit and caboodle to Globe Telecom?

Incendiary comments aside though, my experience with Twitter is hugely different from that of Plurk. Plugging into Twitter is almost like plugging into the Internet itself. Nearly everything that's going on in the world (and on other planets) can be viewed or subscribed to in real-time. When Twoogie got featured on Techcrunch last week, I watched for hours as hundreds of people started talking about our apps via Search.Twitter (or via the absolutely brilliant Tweetdeck). And I realized that the reason this was possible was because tweets are so granular and portable. This kind of Internet-wire-tapping wouldn't make any sense using the Plurk approach because the timeline view is too unwieldy for anything but leisure reading. (And please don't tell me to use the mobile version instead. In my mind, Plurk divorced of its signature interface is just Pownce, and we all know how that story ended.)

It's hard to predict where Plurk will go over the next 12 months. It's in a dangerous state right now; just enough users to be challenging to manage, but not enough to be a serious contender. And most depressingly, it's not growing. It's very likely that it'll be rolled into a bigger company the way Pownce was rolled into Vox, although I have a feeling that the only reason that deal happened at all was due to incestuous nature of the Valley. (The Plurk guys, conversely, are based in Ontario.)

Twitter on the other hand is on the way to hitting the mainstream, in much the same way as blogs did at the turn of the century. It's like a basic utility now, and we'll see more and more people integrate or build on top of it for a long while to come. It's difficult to peg exactly what is causing Plurk's stagnation, although there are a couple of theories out there. My own theory is that Plurk's unconventional layout is preventing it from being seen as anything other than a fancy website, when it needs to be so much more than that if it wants to compete at this level.

If you haven't already, please follow me on Twitter ... or Plurk, whichever of the two you like more.

[ UPDATE: Ia wrote a nice response here. ]

10 Best Indie Songs of 2008

It’s about that time again folks, and I’m happy to report that I’ve been working on my “best music of 2008” list for almost exactly one whole year. That is, I created a “Best of 2008” playlist in iTunes last January and have been slowly filling it up with great songs as I listen to them. The new technique has helped me keep track of the really good stuff that would have otherwise gotten away from me. The list that follows is, unfortunately, not ordered. I have a couple of favorites towards the end, but it was just too hard to rank these songs properly.

Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin - “Modern Mystery”

A real toe-tapper from these indie pop young’uns, on the level of top-shelf Jimmy Eat World. Part of the reason you’ve never heard of these guys is because their name is just impossible. Even the friggin’ acronym – SSLYBY – is unwieldy! That said, I think it’s poetic that their Wikipedia image is of them in concert in Moscow, although they really hail from Missouri. Check out a handful of their live performances on Infinitube, particularly this great clip from earlier in the year.



Ladytron - “Predict the Day”

Electropop at its most unapologetic, Ladytron has been kicking ass in this subgenre since before the breakthrough Witching Hour record and the song everyone knows—“Destroy Everything You Touch”. Velocifero isn’t quite as jawdropping as that 2005 record but “Predict the Day” certainly stands out. Check out various Ladytron concert videos on Infinitube.

Sigur Ros - “Gobbledigook”

In terms of musical arrangement, these Icelanders and their unspellable album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust are at the very top of my 2008 list. The way the various instruments overlay each other at the beginning of “Gobbledigook” is a remarkable achievement in and of itself. “Vio spilum endalaust” is another humdinger (you’ll pardon the lack of dieresis). Various music videos on their official website. (Gobbledigook features a group of nudists rather prominently, so you won’t find it on Youtube.)

Chairlift - “Bruises”

I first started listening to Chairlift in late July, just about a month before Apple used “Bruises” for the new nano-chromatic iPod TV spots. I fully expect these guys to be huge next year. (Hey, if it worked for Feist, right?) Various Chairlift live performances on Infinitube.

Pete and the Pirates - “Knots”

These boys from Reading are exactly the right kind of raucuous. Rowdy without being discordant, exuberant without being annoying, Pete and the Pirates are my personal favorite band of 2008. Other great tracks from their near-perfect debut album Little Death include “Ill Love”, “She Doesn’t Belong to Me” and “Mr. Understanding.” Check out their various live performances on Infinitube.

MGMT - “Kids”

MGMT is the only artist on my list that you could call “dancey,” and with good reason: “Kids” sports what is possibly the best riff of the year. “Electric Feel” and “Time to Pretend” are also must-listens. How can you not love a band that dresses like hippies in this day and age? Check out MGMT live performances on Infinitube.

+/ - “SnowBlind”

Seeing +/- (or {Plus/Minus} to search engine bots) perform this absolutely brilliant song live last month was my third best musical moment of 2008 (#2 being the Eraserheads singing “Huwag Mo Nang Itanong” at the Fort, and #1 being Death Cab for Cutie doing “Photobooth” at the Esplanade in Singapore). That said, I was standing less than 5 feet away from the stage during the +/- gig here in Makati, so it was a vastly more intimate performance.

Ra Ra Riot - "Dying is Fine"

This band from Syracuse, NY only formed in 2006, although you wouldn't think that just by listening to them. Their songs are glittering pop gems that are simultaneously jovial and urgent; their debut album The Rhumb Line is an undeniably beautiful piece of work. Check out the official "Dying is Fine" video here, and various gig recordings on Infinitube here.

The Cure - “Underneath the Stars”

4:13 Dream got some fairly mixed reviews, with more than a few critics calling the Cure’s first album in 4 years a rambling mess. Although I’m not enough of a Cure fan to know where to position Dream in their 13-album canon, there are too many memorable tracks on this album for me to simply write it off. “Underneath” is the 6-minute opener, and it unwinds like smoldering coil. (Live performance on Fuse here.)



Army Navy - “Saints”

A long time ago, there was this band called Teenage Fanclub, who sang my favorite song of all-time Sparky’s Dream. I never found another band that could recreate the particular brand of unabashed nice-ness that this song seems to evoke, but Army Navy comes pretty damn close. (Army Navy live performances on Infinitube.)

===

Other releases I really enjoyed this past year included the Brendan Canning-led Broken Social Scene album, the Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely, Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago, and the Dodos' psychedelic-folk album Visiter. A lot of year-ender lists also rank The '59 Sound and Fleet Foxes very high as well, although I never got as into either of them as I was expecting. Still, they're all worth checking out if you want to get a preview of what other bands will be sounding like in 2009.

See you all in the new year!

Two Small Year-Ender Projects: Kringlr and MMFFMovies

Well it's the last month of the year, folks, which for most of the world means "Christmas" and for most Filipinos, also means "Metro Manila Film Fest." For the former, I put together a kris-kringle organizer called Kringlr, and for the latter, I've built a MMFF Movies widget for use on various social networks.

Kringlr was mostly built for this one particular party, but I figured I could add multi-tenancy and still be able to turn over the project in under 48 hours. The end result is obviously very spartan, but it fits our needs nicely.

The MMFF Movies widget, meanwhile, was a result of playing around with Sprout today. The widget-builder concept is interesting, and for the vast majority of widget creators out there, the available tools on Sprout and its competitor ClearSpring are probably more than enough. As it stands though, I was unable to do anything more interesting than throwing together a few feeds and a polling system (and the poll itself isn't even Sprout-native). In exchange for this relative inflexibility, you're able to push your widget out to an inordinate number of social networks without having to worry about compatibility, and without having to muddle your way through a single web service.

Merry Christmas, Internets.

Ruby Hackathon at Exist

The Exist Ruby team is holding an internal hackathon today (Nov 24th) from 10am to 10pm. Because us Syndeo guys are fairly new to the group, I needed to come up with a way to get everyone familiar with one another quickly, as well as evaluate where everyone’s skillsets were at. Holding a small competition seemed to be the most efficient way to do this.

We split the Ruby practice into six groups with 3 members each, all of them a mix of Cebu and Manila developers. To keep things interesting, we came up with six questions that the teams’ respective applications needed to address, as follows:

RED
Jason, Leslie, Stephen
“What’s the average lifespan of a shoe, by brand?”

BLUE
Mae, Kyle, Dado
“What are the chances that the airplane I’m about to board will crash?”

GREEN
Raymond, Marjun, Rachel
“I smoke a pack a day. How many years before I die?”

YELLOW
Evan, Jay, Gretchen
“How much do people in a given country hate their Internet Service Providers?”

ORANGE
Tim, Jessie, Nuks
“I’ve had 4 shots of vodka and 6 beers tonight. How drunk am I?”

PINK
Marco, Kristina, Mark
“What top goes with this bottom?”

I’ll have another update soon describing how it all went.

Power Distance, or Why I Have to Call You "Ser"

I was reading about Power-Distance Indexes today in Outliers, and was so interested in the topic that I did a bit of side research on my own to see how it affected cultures like the Philippines. Power-Distance is one of the five dimensions of culture first put forth by Dutch writer Geert Hofstede, and is a fascinating answer to that age-old question, “Why are Americans so bloody uncivilized?” (among others).

But first, some definitions. Power-Distance is the extent to which we consider our superiors “superior.” Any organization of a meaningful size will obviously have hierarchies, but depending on your cultural background, it’s possible that you may still treat someone four or five rungs above you as an equal. The key thing here is “culture,” because each culture will have a slightly greater or lesser emphasis on power-distance, and one of Hofstede’s great contributions was to index each country to see how one ranked against another. Interestingly (and not surprisingly) the Philippines is the 4th highest in the global Power-Distance index list. We treat our superiors like superiors, it turns out. We’re trained from birth, after all, not to speak up in the presence of authority. Instead we use hints or exceedingly subtle language (the technical term is “mitigated speech“) in an effort to get our point across without offending our bosses, or clients, or anyone else that we are socially obligated to show respect to.

The United States, meanwhile, (and also not surprisingly) is on the opposite end of the list, #52 out of 67 countries studied. This is, I believe, the reason why we think they’re so uncivilized, because whenever a high PDI person is in a conversation with a low PDI person, the former can barely get a word in. We’re a product of a cultural standard that prevents us from being pricks.

A lot of the more forward-thinking Filipino organizations (and I know that Exist is one of them because I remember having this conversation with them some weeks ago) have started really encouraging their people to slough off these old traditions and start communicating more openly. But I think the question of why we are like this to begin with needs to be looked at as well. For example, you would think that Japan, famous for its massive gestures of respect and tradition, would be higher up on the index than we were, but it’s not even in the top 20. In fact, it’s only a few numbers higher than the US, at #46. So what’s the major difference between Japan and the Philippines, apart from industrialization? The strong presence of a Judeo-Christian religion is probably a big factor. Of the other countries that share the top 5 positions with the Philippines, three (Guatemala, Panama and Mexico) have populations that are about 75-85% Roman Catholic. The number one highest PDI, Malaysia, meanwhile is 60% Muslim. (Note that the correlation with religion is disputed, and admittedly difficult to quantify. To a non-believer though, it makes a lot of sense.)

It also bears mentioning that having a high PDI is not always bad either. There’s a certain subtlety and elegance to the way we interact with our superiors and subordinates that is completely lost on foreigners, and I do not think it’s necessary to lose that altogether. Not everything needs to be said directly, and part of the reason I feel that Americans sound brutish is because they have to spell everything out when they talk. They’re “speaker-oriented,” i.e., they believe that it is the responsibility of the speaker to get his message across. So they tend to overcommunicate. Sometimes, ad nauseum. Meanwhile, Filipinos are “receiver-oriented,” i.e., we believe that it is the responsibility of the listener to infer the message. So we tend to misinterpret. Neither of the two tendencies are particularly healthy when taken to extremes, so the trick really is to look for the appropriate balance for a given situation.

Tons more information on PDI and the other four cultural dimensions (Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance and Long-Term Orientation) at Hofstede’s website here. There’s also a very brief Culture in the Workplace questionnaire here that’s pretty interesting. I scored “32,” i.e., “Your score indicates that you have a moderate Tolerance for Ambiguity and might be willing to give up job security for more opportunity.” Yeah, that sounds about right.

Twitterank Fear-Mongering

A rather interesting internet meme came and went over the past 36 hours regarding a humble new Twitter app called Twitterank. You can find most of the relevant material in this handy Buzzfeed collection, so if you missed out on the freakshow, you may want to check that link out first.

What was interesting about Twitterank actually has nothing to do with the app itself. It was the way people seemed to react to it. Here was a guy how threw together a cute little app (something that we here at Syndeo do all the time), and after a brief period of seeing his work really catch on, he gets publicly mauled for allegedly stealing people's Twitter passwords. Never mind that people give their Twitter passwords to literally dozens of applications already (or did you just happen to forget about your Twitter desktop app, your Facebook widget, your iGoogle Gadget, your Ping.FM account, your auto-follow script, and any of the myriad other Twitter third-party apps you've tried but never really used all that much?).

This ZDNET article for me was the freakshow ringmaster. Incendiary and dismissive at the same time, the author never even bothered to contact Twitterank creator Ryo Chijiiwa before stringing him up for the mob. It even goes so far as to offer a screenshot of the Twitterank source code (and by that, I mean the HTML code, geez) as further proof of Chijiwa's nefariousness. The guys at Syndeo and I all had a good laugh about that one:

@donevan: “Proof” that Twitterank is stealing your passwords: http://twitpic.com/lfm9. Who’s gullible now?

@jasontorres: “I’m in your account stealin’ your tweets.” LOL!

@helloluis: @donevan Holy crap I hope nobody reads the evil comments in our HTML “source” code!

@donevan: @helloluis I did put some stuff there about alien conspiracies re: searching for human intelligence, and how they’ve failed at it apparently

@helloluis: @donevan Thank goodness I remembered to delete those comments about that underaged girl you met at Mugen. Whew!

@donevan: @helloluis You’ve clearly mistaken me for @monduntu.

It's this kind of irrational fear-mongering that drives me nuts sometimes. Seriously, what makes you trust Twitteriffic with your password over Twitterank? Both of them are third-party apps developed primarily by a solitary individual. Certainly Craig Hockenberry may have built up a bigger Internet reputation for himself over the past few years, but that doesn't mean he couldn't be stealing those precious, precious passwords as well.

After some discussion, the guys and I came to the rather oblique conclusion that Twitterank wouldn't have gotten anywhere near this same amount of flack if Chijiwa had bothered to throw a skin on his work before releasing. People are stupid both ways, after all. They'll trust you if you're good-looking, and they'll distrust you if you're ugly. Unfortunately, Twitterank erred towards the latter.

PS. If you're one of those paranoid individuals who changed their Twitter.com passwords upon reading that ZDNET article ... it's not so fun having to change your passwords across all your Twitter third-party apps, huh?

Genius and Success

In Malcolm Gladwell's wonderful new book "Outliers," the notion of genius and its correlation with success is fascinatingly disassembled. It's not exactly news that having a high IQ does not guarantee that you'll be successful in life. It's one of the first things they tell you when you try to apply to MENSA after all. But what's great about Gladwell's take on it is that he's more specific. IQ does matter, but only up to a certain point. It's much easier to correlate success when you're comparing someone with an IQ of 100 (a little below what you'd need to appreciate college) with someone with an IQ of 130 (approaching the "gifted" threshold). However, it doesn't seem to matter as much beyond 130. Here's the killer snippet:

"A mature scientist with an IQ of 130 is as likely to win the Nobel Prize as a scientist with an IQ of 180."

The idea that resonated most with me is that if you are naturally gifted with a high IQ (and 130 is by no means "exceptionally high," it's just above average), it doesn't matter that you could be competing with real one-in-a-million geniuses one day. Beyond 130, the disparity becomes almost insignificant.

So what does matter, past that 130-IQ boundary? Social skills, it turns out. The term Gladwell uses (and he's really quoting Robert Sternberg here) is "Practical Intelligence," which is explained thusly:

"It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. [...] It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want."

Even more interesting is the fact that general intelligence (what we measure with IQ) and practical intelligence are "orthogonal," i.e., the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other. I think we've all met really smart people whose personalities are disappointingly flat. They come off as socially awkward, or just plain abrasive. We can't imagine them making any kind of dent in society because they don't have the skills necessary to communicate the things going on in their heads. Gladwell's theories validate that feeling.

I haven't finished "Outliers" off as I write this, but it's shaping up to be my favorite of his three books. There's a fascinating exposition about the 10,000 hour rule (i.e., how many hours of practice it takes for a human to become an expert in something), and how the most brilliant minds of the past few centuries all managed to finish off their 10,000 hours at a pace faster than most anyone else in their field. There's another great chapter wherein he theorizes that most star athletes are born between January and March, and another where he posits that the school that you go to is not nearly as important to your later success as some people think. I highly recommend that people check this book out; it's a great read and is a really interesting new way to think about success and the things we do to achieve it.

We're On The Move!

Big changes again over this past month. We've moved into the Exist offices in Ortigas and look to be kicking off a new phase in our team's development as a real technology lab. I'm pretty excited about how it's all coming together, although I can't really talk about some of the finer details until everything's been finalized.

What I can say is that I've started coming into the office every day, something which I had serious doubts about during the weeks leading up to all this. One of my defining personality traits characteristics, I think, is a predilection for New Stuff though, and this sudden change of environment is about as New as it gets. Just the act of getting into the car at 8am every day has been a personal feat, although I have to say that I've been enjoying it a lot more than I expected. (The work, not the driving-to-work.)

Prior to October, the team and I were in the office twice a week at the most, and only about 4-5 hours at a time. Now we're suddenly pulling full 8-hour days. (Last Friday, I was there for 12.) Granted, the new office is a lot spiffier than the old one, and I suppose the fact that there are lots of new people to talk to and get to know has a lot to do with it as well. Anyway, exciting times for all.

We've been working on a new labs project that should be ready for release in a week or so. (It isn't a 24-hour app, as you can probably guess.) We've actually got 3 apps in the oven at the moment, but because of the transition, we haven't been able to focus on them. Also, we're hoping to really put some serious time on to Octales, and get that over the line and into a real public beta very soon.

An Extended Rant on Heroes

The third season of the hugely popular show Heroes kicked off two days ago, much to my chagrin. I was mildly interested in this show back in 2006, mostly because I’m a big comic fan and it seemed like the producers had something better than Mutant X in mind. (See, that was my first mistake right there – thinking that this show about superheroes was targeted at comic fans.) There were some interesting reveals during the start of the first season of this show – Hiro’s chrono-kinetic ability was an interesting (although inconsistently applied) plot device, as was Peter power-mimickry. It had potential certainly, and I’ve faithfully watched each episode since s01e01 hoping to see it finally make something of itself.

Of course, as time went on, it became more and more obvious that the people writing this show were not really comicbook guys themselves. I know that comic veteran Jeph Loeb was involved at some point, but honestly it’s hard to see any of his influence in any of the corner-painting shenanigans that was the second – and now third – season of this show.

I have A Couple of Issues with Heroes, and I will attempt to expound on them without actually spoiling any plot points.

The first one is purely stylistic. Heroes has all the tongue-in-cheek dramatics, hokey dialogue and wooden characters of your average comic book (which is forgivable given its target audience), but it’s also such a cliffhanger-whore that it has become more of an annoyance than a pleasure to watch. The general pacing of the story is so heavily skewed into 44-minute increments that with enough practice you can pretty much predict how each episode is going to end (i.e., “and then the door opens and the dude who was dead last episode steps through and smiles!”) Now, I understand that this show needs ratings just like any other series, but there’s something to be said for moderation. Pull your signature trick too often and eventually people get sick of it, you know?

The second one is logical. Remember when I said that the show’s main writers probably aren’t comic guys? The reason why I know this is because no serious comic writer would ever have backed an extended story where you have both time-travellers and unkillables mixing it up. (And not just any “unkillables” either; unkillables who can make other previously-killable characters unkillable!) Why? Because comics at their core are essentially scenario stories, i.e., you give your heroes a problem, and the rest of the story is them solving it. The issue with time-travellers and unkillables is that you will quickly find that there are very few problems that you can throw at them that would have any kind of impact, because they are inherently built to cheat. There is no penalty for them screwing things up, so the whole scenario becomes pointless. And if your readers are paying attention, they will start to ask questions like, “Well, why didn’t he just go back in time and kill that dude when he was still in his mother’s womb?” or “But if he can’t die, then why is he allowing himself to be threatened?” or “Why is this unkillable time-traveller bothering to fight this other time-traveller when he could just skip backwards in time a few minutes and pull off this heist while the other one isn’t there yet?”

Left unchecked, the time-traveller character will transform your story into one that is wrapped almost completely around time travel, because the only interesting thing about time-travel is when you use it to open up alternate timelines all over the place (think Back to the Future, or countless story arcs in the X-men comics). This is essentially what’s going on in Heroes now, all because you’ve got a handfu of characters whose very nature change the rules of your story, and trivializes all of the other characters’ abilities.

If you look at mainstream comics these days, you will be hard-pressed to find any regularly recurring characters that are time-travellers or unkillables, because they make for boring, repetitive stories. Think about it: how many times over the past 3 dozen Heroes episodes has someone gone to, or come back from, a horrific, post-apocalyptic future? It’s about the only feasible plot that this show can throw at its time-travelling, unkillable characters, and it looks like Season 3 is more of the same.